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Monday, July 22, 2013

The Date and Time: Wednesday, June 19, 2013 6:30 PM to 10 PMThe Event: Sip & Savour Ontario (locally grown food paired with VQA wines)The Venue: Fermenting Cellar, Distillery DistrictThe Target Audience: consumers, wine mediaThe Availability/Catalogue: the catalogue listed details about the wines (prices, availability), the Ontario Wine Award winners, the OWA judging team, the food pairing establishments, and Houselink (charity partner).The Quote/Background: there were also live culinary demos, featuring Chef Brad Livergant from The Fifth, Debbie Levy from Dairy Farmers of Canada, and Chef Charles Kerr of Distillery Events catering.The Wines: I could not sample every wine  there were too many of them! Most wines were available through the winery, but some are also at the LCBO.

The Food: wine pairing is always a problem at a consumer show  the lights are dim, the wine must be swallowed, and you might want to re-taste the food with another wine. Nevertheless, we soldier on. The best display was Summer Fresh dips and sauces: they had a well-lit lounge with crackers and veggies, plus more than a half-dozen of their 20 or so dips, all accompanied by just one wine pairing (a Crush Riesling Gewurztraminer 2011 which went rather well against such an assortment of sauce flavours). Most food stations were tables where samples could be picked up, and most had just short lineups. The Fifth provided a red fife crepe with duck confit, the Dairy Farmers had three cheeses (Tre Stelle Feta, Mountainbrook Aged Gouda, and Empire 4-year old cheddar, all exceptional), Distillery Events featured smoked and cured candied salmon with house bannock, and Aria Ristorante had a chilled zucchini soup with shrimp "chips". Barque had exquisitely smoked salmon, Crush Wine Bar produced halibut fired fish sliders on house buns, while the Houselink Food Program had an eggplant appetizer on cracker. Bernardin showed off its pepper and garlic jelly bruschetta and veggie antipasto, Stonemill was the "official bread sponsor" and Q Water the "official water sponsor", while Popelin had innovative choux a la crème for Icewine pairing.The Downside: as it was a consumer show, the lights were lowered, so it was difficult to actually see the wine and much of the food.The Upside: a chance to re-try some of the wines I had blindly judged.The Contact Person: tony.aspler@rogers.com; sandy@forefrontcom.comThe Event's Marketing Effectiveness and Execution (numerical grade): 92